Sister Nivedita

“ One cannot help feeling that it is the political greatness of Ayodhya and Pataliputra, each in its own period, that leads it to preach a new religion in the form of a definite incarnation of Vishnu—in the one case Rama, in the other Krishna. And if this be true, it lends an added interest to the fact that the worship of Sita-Rama has now its greatest following in the Dravida-desh. We may take it perhaps as a law that a religion is likely to survive longest and with greatest power, not in the region of its birth. ”

“ The image of Mahadeva has gone through many further phases of simplification since the day we speak of, but this Shiva of Benares and the other of Elephanta belong to a single historic period, and the small four-headed stupa outside the caves is one of their most precious relics.
Hinduism throbs with the geography and history of India. In every image of Shiva speaks the voice of pre-Gupta Benares. In that complex conception of Krishna which blends in one the Holy Child of Brindaban, the Hero of the Gita, and the Builder of Dwarka, we celebrate the vision of the royal house of Pataliputra. ”

“ Historically it brought about the birth of Hinduism. In all these respects Buddhism created a heritage which is living to the present day. Amongst the forces which have gone to the making of India, none has been so potent as that great wave of redeeming love for the common people which broke and spread on the shores of Humanity in the personality of Buddha. By preaching the common spiritual right of all men whatever their birth, He created a nationality in India which leapt into spontaneous and overwhelming expression so soon as his message touched the heart of Asoka, the People's King. ”

“ Whether this was actually so or not, it is certain that one of the great impulses of the day lay in the rebellion against the necessity of the Vedic sacrifice, one of its finest sincerities in that exaltation of the personal experience which made it seem natural to found on it a religion. That a man's religious convictions must be the result of his own private realisation of truth is an idea so old in India as to lie behind the Upanishads themselves. ”

“ Never was there a father who more deeply gave his confidence to his children. Yet without the work done by Chandra Gupta the grandfather and completed by Asoka himself in his earlier years, in the long-repented conquest of Kalinga, or Orissa, this blossoming time of true nationality, when all races and classes of Indian folk were drawn together by one loving and beloved sovereign, would not have been possible. ”

“ The religious teacher of those days lived retired in the forest clearings and gathered round him, not a sect, but a school, in the form of a few disciples. Jainism, with its sudden intense revolt against the sacrificial idea, and its sudden determination to make its pity effective for the protection of dumb animals, was the first religious doctrine to call social forces to its aid in India; in other words, it was the first organised sect or church, and by forming itself it invented the idea of sects, and the non-Jainas began to hold themselves in some sort of unity round the Aryan priesthood. ”

“ It is clear from many of the allusions in the life of Krishna, as told both in the Mahabharata and in the Puranas, that He directly, in most places, supersedes the Vedic gods. In the moment of his Ascension it is Indra who hymns Him. And already at Brindaban He has successfully preached the Law of Karma in opposition to Vedic sacrifice, and has succeeded in bringing Indra low in the ensuing contest. This new religion of Vishnu, indeed, like that of Shiva, belongs to a different class from that of the old nature-gods. The more modern are subjective. ”

“ The time had now come when men could no longer accept their beliefs on authority. Religion must for all equally be a matter of the personal experience, and there is no reason to doubt the claim made by the Jainas, that Buddha was the disciple of the same guru as Mahavira. We know the age of a heresy by the tenets it contradicts, and in repudiating the authority of the Vedas, Jainism proves itself the oldest form of nonconformity in India. ”

“ In ancient Egypt the world saw a peasant nation stirred to emulation by the sight of empires—Hittite, Babylonian, Cretan, and perhaps Phoenician—and fully able to protect itself by its grasp of the idea of national solidarity and self-defence. This is the value of science, that it analyses a fact, displays the secret of power, and enables man to formulate new methods for arriving at the old result.
The sense of unity can only occur, as a spiritual reaction on the mind, against a manifoldness. ”

“ Hinduism is long ago a virtual unity—though that fact may not yet have been realised and defined—with its choice of religious systems to meet the needs of various types of character, and the great monastic guru stands outside all as a quickening and spiritualising force, whose influence is felt in each alike. ”

“ A map of a country is only a script produced by all the ages of its making. In the beautiful maps of the past, in which rivers are seen with their true value as the high roads of nature, the veins and arteries of civilisations, this fact was still more apparent than to-day, when the outstanding lines of connection between cities are railways, the channels of the drainage of wealth being of more importance than those of its production. Yet even now it is the river-made cities that the railways have to connect. Even the twentieth century cannot escape the conditions imposed by the past. ”

“ The men who unite, with the energy of the thunderbolt, for the attainment of the common goal of heart and conscience, must be men accustomed to combined action and sustained co-operation; men who know the grounds of their faith in one another; men who are familiar with certain outstanding principles of conduct, and constantly dominated by them. Such character, such experience, is built up for the service of the nation by social forms like those of tribe and crew and lion-hunt. ”

“ The world is now so familiar with the spectacle of the religious leader going out from amongst his fellows and followed by all who think with him, to found some sect which is to be even as a new city of the human spirit, that it can hardly think itself back to the time when this was a thing unknown. In the age of the Vedas and Upanishads, however, the spectacle had not yet been seen in India. ”

“ Thus the family gives place, in the imagination, to the crew, as the organised unit of the human fabric, and the love of hearthside and brood becomes exalted into that civic passion which can offer up its seven sons and yet say with firm voice, "Sweet and seemly is it to die for one's country." ”

“ There is no real ground for confusion. On our right is another low relief of Durga, throwing herself into the universe, in God-intoxication. Behind her the very air is vocal with saints and angels chanting her praises. ”

“ And very few are the Bengali minds that have yet reached a point in the assimilation and expression of a new form of thought and knowledge, which would make it possible to say that they are of another age than that of Vikramaditya. Of that new age Science is to be the pivot and centre, and there can be no doubt that the era of Science, with its collateral development of geography and history, will directly succeed that of the Guptas, with its Sanskrit Literature and logic in Bengal. ”

“ The large outlook and due combination of readiness for war with love of peace are created by lifelong considerations of the common good and the way in which it is to be served by a clear mutual understanding. And all these results have been produced on mankind, unsought, by its history and its environment. ”

“ The unconscious aim of the world without will be to assimilate more and more of the overflow of idealism that comes from within it, more and more of the personal impress left by One in whom all men's aspirations have been fulfilled. From this point we can see that the Order itself must some day die out in India, from sheer philosophical inanition and the want of a new Buddha. ”

“ Only the history of Asia explains the geography of Asia. Empire means organisation, organisation whose basis is the consciousness of a unity that transcends the family. That is to say, empire demands as its preceding condition a strong civic concept. ”

“ The character of a people is their history as written in their own subconscious mind, and to understand that character we have to turn on it the lime-light of their history. Then each anomaly is explained, and the whole becomes a clear and consistent result of causes traced to their very root. ”

“ Elephanta, then, perpetuates the synthesis of Hinduism. How royal was the heart that could portray no part of his people's faith—even though it held his personal conviction and worship—without the whole ! Not Saivite alone, but Saivite, Vaishnavite, and the still remembered worshipper of Brahma, go to make up the Aryan congregation. All alike, it is felt, must be represented. ”

“ She triumphs over death—not by the heroic methods of the earlier maiden, who could appeal to the honour of the gods and meet with jovial and thoroughly benevolent treatment in return, but by sheer force of the spiritual ideal. Born of prayer itself, prepared for the supreme encounter by vigil and fast, Savitri is no Vedic princess, but a tender, modern, Hindu woman. She belongs almost unconsciously to the coming era of subjective soul-staying faiths. ”

“ We ought not, in the attempt to follow up some of the thousand and one threads of interest that our traveller leaves for us, to forget the one or two glimpses of himself that he vouch-safes us. Never can one who has read it forget the story of his visit to the cave that he knew on the hill of Gridhrakuta, where Buddha used to meditate, in Old Rajgir : "Fa-Hian, having purchased in the new town perfumes, flowers, and oil lamps, hired two aged bhikshus to conduct him to the grots and to the hill Khi-che. ”

“ Alreadly Jainism must have been a force acting, as we have seen, to unify the Arya-Vedic and the popular unorganised beliefs, giving its first impetus, in fact, to the evolution of what would afterwards be Hinduism, and this process Buddhism, with its immense aggressiveness for the redemption of man, would greatly intensify. ”

“ Their sphere is in the soul, and their power that of the highest ideals. Indra, Agni, Yama, and Varuna represented external forces, cosmic some of them, irresistible in their might by puny man, glorious, lovable, but not of the within. ”

“ Krishna in the later epic seems to be consciously a second attempt to paint the mercy of God in incarnation.
The ideas that succeed in India are always firm-based on the national past. Thus that idealism of the motherland which is to-day the growing force intellectually can go back for foundation to the story of Uma, wedded in austerity to the great God. Similarly it would be very interesting to see worked out by some Indian scholar the root- sources in Vedic literature of these conceptions of Shiva and Vishnu. ”

“ Personally I believe that as our understanding of India progresses, we shall more and more be led to recognise the importance of place and history in accounting for those differentiations which certain common ideas have gradually undergone. ”

“ Taking Buddha as the founder, not of a sect, but of a monastic order, it is easy to see that his social organisation could never be cumulative. There must in fact come a time when it would die out. No new members could be born into his fold. ”

“ A strong sense of unity precedes aggression, and the sense of unity is made effective through internal definition and self-organisation. Such organisation is obviously easy to gain by the conquest of the sea, where captain, first mate, and second mate will be a father, with his eldest son and second son, and where the slightest dereliction from military discipline on the part of one may involve instant peril of death to all. ”

“ Here again, we see examples of the educational value of tribal and pastoral life, in preparing communities for the organisation of nations and empires.
In the far past, those shadowy empires whose memories are all but dead to man—the Assyrian, the Parthian, the Median, and some others—seem to have based their powers of aggression and co-operation on the instincts and associations of the hunter. From one point of view, the hunter is on land what the fisher is on water ; and the soldier is only a hunter of men. But the mind of man is supreme. ”

“ Buddha in his turn accepted from Jainism its fearless pity, but not contented with the protection of the dumb creature, added to the number of those to be redeemed man himself, wandering in ignorance from birth to birth, and sacrificing himself at every step to his own transient desires. ”

“ Every child knows the names of the seven sacred rivers; and the perfect tirtha, for every province of India, has taken a man these many centuries to the Himalayas, to Dwarka, to Cape Comorin, and to Puri. ”

“ This fact constitutes a supreme instance of the way in which the mightiest political forces in history are brought into being by those who stand outside politics. The great Chandra Gupta, founding an Empire 300 B.C., could not make a nationality in India. He could only establish that political unity and centralisation in whose soil an Indian nationality might grow and come to recognise itself. ”

“ In the Moorish university African, Arab, Jew, and European all met, some to give, others to take, in the great exchange of culture. It was possible there to take as it were a bird's-eye view of the most widely separated races of men, each with its characteristic out-look. ”

“ The second type of imperial organisation, seen within the last two thousand years, is the pastoral empire of Central Asia and Arabia. Islam was the religious form taken by the national unification of a number of pastoral tribes in Arabia. Mohammed, the Prophet of God, was in truth the greatest nation-maker who has ever appeared. The earliest associations of the Arabs are inwoven with the conception of the tribe as a civic unity, transcending the family unity ”

“ They were touched to behold such a man : they observed amongst themselves that a very few had indeed expatriated themselves for the sake of the Doctrine, but no one had ever forgotten Self in quest of the law, as Fa-Hian had done. One must know the conviction which truth produces, otherwise one cannot partake of the zeal which produces earnestness. Without merit and without activity, nothing is achieved. On accomplishing aught, with merit and with activity, how shall one be abandoned to oblivion? To lose what is esteemed—to esteem what mankind forgot—Oh! ”

“ The difference between "India of the North"—or the Gandharan provinces beyond the Indus—and India proper in all matters of learning and the faith comes out very prominently in the pages of Fa-Hian, and ought to refute sufficiently all who imagine Gandhara as possessed of a culture in any way primary and impulsive, instead of entirely derivative and passive. ”